The present invention relates to photography and more particularly to digital cameras.
Panoramic images are generally produced by seaming together a number of single view images. However, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to obtain a number of single view images which fit together exactly to form a panorama. In general the single view images must be modified slightly in order to make them fit together into a panorama.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/602,290 filed Jun. 23, 2000 describes a program for interactively seaming a plurality of single view images into a panorama. The program described in application Ser. No. 09/602,290 allows an operator to modify the parameters of single view image such as heading, pitch, bank, offset, brightness and contrast so that the images will fit together to form a panoramic image.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/338,790 filed Jun. 23, 1999 entitled xe2x80x9cSystem for Digitally Capturing and Recording Panoramic Moviesxe2x80x9d describes a system for capturing multiple single view images which can be later seamed into panoramas. The camera shown in application Ser. No. 09/338,790 includes six lenses each of which can capture a single view image. The images captured by the lenses are transmitted to a computer which places the images in files for later processing. An interactive seamer program such as that shown in patent application Ser. No. 09/602,290 can be used to process the images, that is, to seam the single view images into panoramas.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/697,605 describes a system for calibrating a camera, that is, for determining the parameters of a particular camera that can be used to modify images taken by the camera so that images will fit together into a panorama.
The present invention provides an improvement for a camera which has a plurality of subsystems that capture a plurality of single view images which together form a panorama. Factors such as the mechanical alignment of the image sensing devices, the field of view of the various lenses, the pincushion and skew of the lenses, and parallax errors, give each image capture subsystem its own special characteristics. The operation of seaming the images from such a camera into a panorama is facilitated if one knows the particular characteristics of the image capture subsystems which produced the images, that is, if one knows the modifications which must be made to images from the camera in order to seam the images into a panorama without artifacts.
The present invention records the identification of the particular camera that produced a set of images along with the images produced by the camera. The characteristics of the particular camera are also recorded either in the camera or in a separate file. The program used to seam a set of single view image then has available information concerning the camera that produced the images and it can compensate for the characteristics of the particular image capture device that produced that particular images.